Hemingway Letters Reveal Shyness, Early Talent

May 6, 1986|By United Press International

BOSTON — Newly released letters chronicling a young Ernest Hemingway's blossoming literary talent and withering first marriage may shed new light on the Nobel Prize winner's formative years, scholars said Monday.

Jack Hemingway, son of the author, donated the letters and other documents to the John F. Kennedy Library's Hemingway Collection.

The documents also include interviews with reporters who worked with Hemingway during his career at the Toronto Star, said James Nagel, a professor at Northeastern University.

''They deal with how shy he was, how reticent, how eager to please he was and how well he wrote -- even though he had relatively minor assignments at the time,'' Nagel said.

Many of the letters come from Hemingway's first wife, Hadley. They begin in 1923, but three years later she learned of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who later became his second wife.

''These letters deal with a difficult period,'' Nagel said, adding that Hemingway and the two women lived together at a villa in southern France owned by author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda.

Nagel said that period might have formed the crux of a hitherto undiscovered novel, The Garden of Eden, to be published May 28.